The problem of the nature of the world without regard to our recipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical worth.
(Freud, The Future of an Illusion)
Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? – In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? – Or is the use its life?
(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 432)
Natural science does not simply describe or explain nature. It is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.
(Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy)
Old myths die hard. The very first page of Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism contains the confident assertion that “the theory of society worked out by Marx and Engels … [was] called by them ‘scientific socialism’”. Bernstein’s confidence (as is well known in other connections) was misplaced. Quite apart from the fact that today it is no longer customary to assume a joint identity for Marx and Engels, Bernstein’s assertion – which resounds through the writings of other Marxists and commentators – can be faulted on a number of grounds. The least important of these grounds is that Marx himself never used the phrase “scientific socialism”. Considering its provenance and etymology, he could not have used it. Even when Engels applied this phrase as an appropriate designation of Marxism in his Anti-Dühring, in order to combat a quite different notion of what scientific socialism was, Marx, for his part, did not adopt Engels’s use of the expression, and for very good reason.
It is remarkable that Engels’s claim that Marx was familiar with AntiDühring has remained unchallenged; the conceptual chasm separating Marx’s writings from the arguments Engels set forth in Anti-Dühring is such that even if Marx was familiar with these arguments, he disagreed with them. Although there is no direct evidence that Marx ever even read Anti-Dühring, Engels claimed, after Marx’s death, that he “read the whole manuscript to him [Marx] before it was printed” and that a small part “was written by Marx but unfortunately had to be shortened by me [Engels] for purely external reasons”, reasons which Engels, cryptically, does not specify. Alfred Schmidt, curiously, regards it as certain that Marx was familiar with Anti-Dühring on the grounds that Marx refers in the first volume of Capital to Engels’s conception of “the transformation of quantity into quality” spelled out in Chapter 12 of AntiDühring. Yet Marx refers not to Engels but to Hegel; what he says, in his discussion of the transformation of the possessor of money and commodities into the capitalist, is that “here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel [in his ‘Logic’] that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes”. Marx added to the third edition a footnote saying that “the molecular theory of modern chemistry rests on no other law”.1
Marx’s work is often seen as the instigator of the “tyranny of concepts” – the title of a book attacking Marxism by Gordon Leff – never as its victim. Yet many slogans continue to influence, sometimes imperceptibly, our judgment of his writings. It is by no means uncommon, even today, to find academic discussions of these writings constructed around concepts such as “historical inevitability” or “dialectical materialism”, however discredited by recent scholarship these may be. The concept of “economic determinism”, applied to a thinker who quite clearly specified that he subscribed to a belief in the social determination of economic categories, is an example of misleading, even emotive, labelling. Historically, slogans have been used by Marxist and opponents of Marxism to carry descriptive force, but this is no reason to perpetuate the bad habit. It is hard to think of any other social or political thinker who has suffered from imposed categories, proceeding from friend and foe alike, as much as Marx.
The argument advanced here is that the concept of scientific socialism is such an imposed category, one which is not only of no help to an understanding of Marx’s writings and enterprises, but is also positively detrimental. The issue is anything but purely terminological. “Scientific socialism” is a phrase used by later Marxists in order to guarantee methodological certainty and doctrinal orthodoxy of a certain type. The first of these users was Engels, who popularized the phrase in his own essay in Anti-Dühring which was published separately as Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Engels was by no means the worst offender, but he may have been the most important, giving as he did a new lease of life to a phrase that had nothing but the most odious connotations to Marx himself. Engels also indicated one crucial characteristic of the phrase in question – that it
was from the first intended to deal with a series of misapprehensions of Marx’s central beliefs, misapprehensions which it succeeded in compounding. As Lichtheim points out, Engels’s popularization of his mentor was, along with positivism, influential in acquainting the intelligentsia, inside and outside the German Social-Democratic Party, with a world-view that was “materialist” and “scientific” in the sense which those terms then possessed for those who advocated extension of the methods of natural science to history and to society. It is a commonplace that the later nineteenth century exhibited no shortage of such advocates; it is less of a commonplace, though rather more important, that Karl Marx should not be numbered among them.
There is “no typically Marxist methodology that has affected the progress of natural science”;2 indeed, Marxism historically has always been weak on science. It has been weak on science despite (or because of) Engels’s wellknown interest in the natural science, an interest which Marx, from all accounts, did not share to the same extent (any more than he shared Engels’s interest – one which seems to have done less damage – in military history). There is, after all, very little argument about natural science as such, or its methods, in Marx, but a good deal of this in Engels. It might be claimed that Marx’s lack of concern has helped prevent later Marxists from adequately comprehending the threats and promises of scientific progress; and to be sure, examples of lack of comprehension are not hard to come by. Herbert Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man has been roundly criticized because of its uneasy prospect of a “liberated technology” which somehow would avoid the baneful effects of unliberated technology in late capitalist society; this prospect seems to take us no further in our critical task than Engels’s less-celebrated strictures about “revolutionary mathematics and mechanics”. One of Marcuse’s most trenchant and most sympathetic critics has been Jürgen Habermas, the heir-apparent of critical theory. Habermas, following the Frankfurt School’s critique of mechanistic Marxism, has presented an alternative claim – that the scientific and “instrumentalist” tendencies inherent in classical Marxism make necessary the construction of a “metatheory” that will restore the dimension of communication and emancipation.3 The argument advanced here differs from both these claims. Marx himself does seem to have been aware of the pitfalls of scientistic or positivistic Marxism and was careful
to stand back from them, so that what we need to do (for the time being) is to read Marx carefully. The task is urgent, for the easy demolition of the views of Engels on science and society has not, for the most part, taken account of the fact that these were views that Marx did not share. By now, the demolition of Engels’s theory of science, as set forth in The Dialectics of Nature rather than Anti-Dühring, has become a kind of ritual, recently and joyously celebrated in Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity, which is not original in pinpointing what Monod calls “the epistemological disaster which ensues from the ‘scientific’ use of dialectical interpretation”.4 Yet Monod nowhere considers Marxism to be anything but the Marxist–Leninist Weltanschauung of “dialectical materialism”. This Weltanschauung is indeed positivistic and scientistic; in the hands of Engels alone Marxism became concerned with ultimate laws and constituents of the universe – something about which Marx himself had remained strangely silent. Engels even tried to deduce the “dialectics” (a word not found in Marx except when Marx was criticizing Proudhon) of society from the dialectics of nature, ascribing to Marx a coherent monistic system of materialist metaphysics which comprised a philosophy of nature and a theory of “Society” as well as a view of history. Yet Marx himself entertained no such beliefs, adumbrated no such system, and was invariably hostile to thinkers who did either of these things.
It might be claimed (perhaps by someone wishing to give new life to the hoary old interpretation that the late differs substantively from the early Marx) that “the thinking of the mature Marx discloses a growing emphasis” on the “scientific study of impersonal forces, or processes independent of human volition, forces and processes that could be described by analogy to the physical world”. Lichtheim exaggerates in saying that “it is evident from his writings and correspondence that Marx gradually came to adopt a standpoint which in some respects resembled the scientism of his age”.5 Unsurprisingly, Lichtheim provides no documentation to support his claim. Such claims find remarkably little substantiation in the writings of Marx, writings which, on the contrary, remain noticeably faithful to a way of looking at natural science and at society that was first set out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and discussed in greater detail in The German Ideology. In view of this, we shall find that the most that can be said is that Marx’s resounding silence on many of the issues that according to Engels make up the Marxian “system” left a gap that Engels and his successors were only too happy to fill. The result was that Engels’s numerous writings on science attained a wide circulation – such a wide circulation that, even today, whoever would take it upon himself to demonstrate that Marx’s position is irreducible to that of Engels is obliged to take the high road, and to reconstruct Marx’s position from an interpretation of his own writings.
Marx’s evident distaste for the concept (and even the expression) of “scientific socialism” in all probability is derived from its provenance. The phrase was first used by (of all people) Proudhon, and was popularized by Karl Grün who thought that Saint-Simon was a scientific socialist. Marx, whose invective and animus against Proudhon and Grün is a matter of record, considered that SaintSimon was, among other things, a utopian.
Marx, before the Paris Commune, never described himself as a socialist, let alone a scientific socialist. He always identified himself as a communist. There are good reasons for this. Socialism pre-dated Marx; it was already flourishing on French soil when Marx arrived in Paris in 1843, as a movement which advocated economic amelioration and legislative protection for the workers, universal suffrage, civil rights of association and freedom of opinion, co-operative institutions, and cultural opportunities for the poor. Communism, too, was flourishing in Paris at the time, but it was flourishing quite separately from socialism; what was distinctive about communism can be seen in its drastic points of difference from the thought of one prominent thinker who delighted in the appellation “socialist”, Proudhon’s bête noire, Louis Blanc, who did not believe either in the organization of the revolutionary working class or in the abolition of private property relations. Communists, by contrast, espoused both beliefs, with some virulence, and rejected the socialists’ markedly positive attitude towards the state; their lineage may be traced back to the cercle social of the French Revolution – Leclerc, Roux, Babeuf and Buonarroti – whose writings Marx studied in Paris.
Marxism made its bid after the socialist movement had already become organized, conscious, active, doctrinaire and French, which does much to explain the relative slowness of the penetration of Marxism into the French radical tradition. Lorenz Von Stein’s Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs (1842) designates as socialists the three writers Marx was to consider (in the Manifesto) “critical-utopian”, namely Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, and whose followers Marx was likewise to dismiss as fanatical sectarians building castles in the air. Marx believed that socialism, like Proudhonism, was by definition utopian and doctrinaire, and that it was by the same token a false brother to communism; he thought that for this reason its very name should be avoided. Moreover, not only were socialists utopian, or reformist, or both; they were also invariably members of eminently middle-class movements craving respectability, as opposed to the communists who (whether they were utopians or not) were at least autonomous and proletarian.
Socialism by the 1840s had not become – and in the eyes of Marx could never become – the common creed of the working class, whereas the communism of Etienne Cabet (or for that matter of Wilhelm Weitling) had the considerable merit of endorsing class war, revolution and the abolition of private property relations, even if Cabet and Weitling did propound their beliefs in a rough-hewn way. “The theory of the communists,” stated The Communist Manifesto (which proclaims in its first sentence Marx and Engels’s adherence to communism rather than their invention of it) “may be summed up in a single sentence: the abolition of private property [Aufhebung des Privat-Eigenthums]” – a sentence that was designed explicitly to distinguish the authors’ adopted communism from the Gütergemeinschaft or communauté des biens so earnestly preached by the socialists. In accordance with this, Marx was to write, some twenty-five years later, that the (First) International “has been founded to replace socialist or semi-socialist sects with the real organization of the working class”.6
The distinction between socialism (“scientific” or not) and communism that Marx outlined in the Manifesto was in fact maintained throughout Marx’s later, more detailed, historical writings. It has been pointed out that in The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for instance, “the term ‘socialism’ glitters with many meanings, including an ironic use, calling everything that offended the interests of the party of order … by the name of socialism”,7 but the basic distinction that the Manifesto had outlined is maintained throughout these writings: the “socialist doctrinaires” (Ledru-Rollin, Lamartine, Blanc) are always distinguished from and compared unfavourably with “the proletariat’s real revolutionaries” (Blanqui, Cabet, Raspail). Marx felt very strongly about the distinction between those who could be curtly dismissed as “socialist miracle workers” and those with whom he had identified himself. After all, Blanquism, in the harsh but accurate words of Georges Sorel’s La décomposition de Marxisme, amounted to nothing more than “the revolt of the poor conducted by a revolutionary staff”; whereas the whole point of the Manifesto, and the International, was to eschew conspiratorialism and to present to the world, openly and even brazenly, the views and aims of a movement. This movement, though numerically weak, was an authentic, autonomous, workingclass, international movement dedicated to a type of revolutionary programme that had transcended both the conspiratorialism of Babeuf and the elitism of Blanqui, together with reformism of nay stripe. Marx, whose personal intolerance is notorious, even tended to adhere to those revolutionaries who were on the correct side of the communist-socialist hiatus; he greatly admired Weitling and broke with him most reluctantly, even though Weitling tended to recruit among skilled artisans rather than the nascent proletariat and refused even to recognize the role of an organized working-class movement.
It should not surprise us, then, that the word “socialism” occurs in Capital only in a derogatory sense, applied usually to Proudhon and the utopians; Marx, it seems, never got over his dislike for the word or the concept, although the sharpness of the distinction between communism and socialism came to be blurred in later years. The reasons why this blurring took place have little enough to do with Marx’s personal preferences. The fédérés of the Paris
Commune – thanks to exaggerated charges of terrorism and atrocity made against them by the bourgeois press – succeeded in giving “communism” a sinister and threatening reputation, which added urgency to the September 1871 resolution of the International prohibiting the use by its branches of any “sectarian names such as Positivists, Mutualist, Collectivists, and Communists”. As Marx insisted at a speech at a banquet the same month, “the International propagates no particular credo”.8
On the other hand, the Commune buried together with its dead many utopian brands of socialism, so that the meaning of the word “socialism” itself began to undergo a change; the distinction between socialism and communism, so important to Marx before the Commune, was disappearing of its own accord. Socialism was becoming more of a working-class movement that was increasingly inclined to look to Marx and Engels, who were becoming revolutionary elder statesmen, for guidance and an imprimatur. These developments were particularly evident in the case of the German social democratic movement, whose deliberate decision to abandon the term “communist” came to be of great strategic importance, since it reflected a determination not even to appear to want to resort to the tactics that had been responsible for the French disaster of 1871. Success, so it seemed, could be appropriated by German social democracy only if the distinction between socialism and communism were no longer too rigidly applied. What needed to be stressed in its stead was a spirited repudiation of armed insurrection as a means of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat by a historical short-cut; such a repudiation had precedent, as the Manifesto was once again available in published (and this time in widely-disseminated) form as a reference. A celebrated indication of the shift was provided by Engels’s “Introduction” to The Class Struggles in France, which, like his “Prefatory Note” to The Peasant War in Germany, expressed confidence in the Germans’ obtaining Socialist revolution at the ballot box. Confidence in “legality” was now at a premium.
The compatibility of this aspect of social democratic orthodoxy with Engels’s (and, still more, Bernstein’s) faith in the precepts of “scientific socialism” is well known; but because it largely post-dated Marx’s death, it should not be read back into Marx’s lifetime. It was not an issue that struck Marx – whose own sentiments were expressed, in acerbic but almost aphoristic fashion, throughout the Critique of the Gotha Program – as being particularly important.
Marx uses the word science throughout his writings in such a way that it is always quite incompatible with a crude, positivistic usage, although not all of Engels’s formulations are incompatible with positivism in anything like the same way. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx says that
“industry is the actual historical relationship of nature, and thus of natural science, to man … natural science will then abandon its abstract materialist, or rather idealist, orientation, and will become a human science [Geisteswissenschaft]”. Two years later, in The German Ideology, we find Marx’s more celebrated prolegomenon: “where speculation ends, in real life, there real positive science begins: the depiction [Darstellung] of the practical activity, of the practical process of development, of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place….” Here the word science explicitly means “the study of the actual life-process and activity of the individuals of each epoch”. With respect to the methodology involved in this “study”, Marx is again explicit. The place of “philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge”, he says, must be taken by a
summing-up [Zusammenfassung] of the most general results derived through abstraction form the observation of men’s historical development. These abstractions have in themselves, i.e. if considered apart from real history, no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement [Ordnung] of the historical material, to indicate the sequence [Reihen-folge] of its separate strata [Schichten]…. Our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation [Betrachtung] and the arrangement, the real depiction of historical material.9
In the course of a single letter – the well-known letter of Schweitzer about Proudhon – we find the word science being used with reference to his own conception of science and to erroneous, dogmatic, conceptions, such as pseudopositivism and positivism itself. Qu’est-ce que la propriété? could find no place in a strictly scientific history of political economy (though this is in itself no reason to dismiss the book as valueless), says Marx; later in the same letter, Proudhon’s bombastically “scientific” claims on behalf of this own doctrine, as set forth in La philosophie de la misère, are lambasted because they are without foundation.10Marx’s scientific work, or the work and procedures that Marx regarded as scientific, did not, according to Marx’s own admission, aim at the discovery of universal laws (or, as he would say, of “eternal” laws) regulating political economy or governing human behaviour (although the same certainly cannot be said for Proudhon, which is one of the reasons Marx came to dislike him so much). To see this will help to resolve an apparent paradox. The International, whose Brussels Congress passed a resolution claiming that “Karl Marx has the inestimable merit of being the first economist to have subjected capital to
a scientific analysis”, nevertheless insisted that “the principles of positivism [were] directly opposed to [its] statutes”.11
The idea that Marx aimed at fashioning “a new science of society” resting upon “historical laws”, or that “according to Marx, capitalism, by reason of the innate laws of its own nature, is hurrying along a path which will lead the world of today with the inevitability of the evolution of organic life, to the doors of the world of tomorrow”12 is simply without foundation. Marx’s response to the once prominent contemporary positivist who did aim to fashion such a social science is instructive as well as characteristic. In the summer of 1866 Marx read Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42) “because the English and the French make such a fuss of the fellow” and was singularly unimpressed with what he found there – as his later ironic dismissal of “Comtist recipes for the cook-shops of the future” bears witness.13 The reasons for this are not simply that Comte, like Proudhon, defended private property, preached class collaboration, welcomed Louis Bonaparte’s deliverance of France from parliamentary government, and, not altogether unlike Proudhon, considered that the moral regeneration of the French people took precedence over their political and economic emancipation. The differences go much deeper. Comte aimed to fashion a new science of society, conceived in historical terms and resting on historical laws. He imagined that this achievement would make possible the placing of morals and politics on the same scientific basis, putting an end to the divorce between the certainties of science and the affirmations of moral experience “by giving point to fact and ground to value”;14 he also wanted by virtue of this accomplishment to bring to a close an era of restless competition in economic and intellectual life which had left men secure in neither possessions nor beliefs. Comte’s sociology dispensed with class conflict as the agency of historical change, and also elevated “Society” to a plane which would be fantastic for a Marxist: the science of society was held to consist in the harmonious interaction of the various parts of society. Moreover, empirical knowledge, for Comte, constituted the whole of science. This contrasts markedly with the Hegelian approach, which sees empirical knowledge as a medium, through which the understanding develops its self-consciousness. With Marx, empirical knowledge is instrumental in much the same way (and, indeed, this is even true of the later writings of Engels, closer to positivism though these were). Comte’s own belief that his positivism is incompatible with idealism is vindicated; but, by the same token, it is incompatible with revolutionary Marxism. Both doctrines would be
to a Comtean “metaphysical” and therefore anathema. Only what Comte would disparagingly call a speculative philosopher or a metaphysician would make the claim to have grasped the essential reality concealed behind the immediate sense data of experience. But Marx, as we shall see, claimed this constantly, particularly in Capital. No positivist would venture to claim that his method consisted in going beyond the world of appearances to the world underlying and explaining these phenomena, yet this is precisely Marx’s explicit intention, for instance in the chapter on the “Fetishism of Commodities” in the first volume of Capital.
Marx did not emphasize empirical knowledge in the way that Comte did. Neither the “relations of production” nor the “mode of production” is definable in terms of perceived physical objects; and even the “forces of production”, which seem at first glance to be more empirical, are seen not as a concatenation of things but as a development, as something in transition, a development that takes place whenever the underlying social circumstances permit. Even technical objects, seen in isolation, were unimportant in the Marxian schema. On the other hand, concepts that are central to Marx’s explanations are simply not definable in Comtean terms. Comte meant the word “positive” to indicate, among other things, the transformation of knowledge from the “speculative” to the “scientific” stage; at that stage, facts, instead of being explained a priori, become connected by general laws of a completely “positive” kind, suggested and confirmed by the facts themselves. This position rests, however provisionally, on a factvalue distinction that Marx, following Hegel’s critique of Kant, denied, although the neo-Kantians (whose thought was perfectly compatible, sad to say, with a naturalistic, scientistic Marxism) did not. Such was the almost automatic approval given to the word “science” that Eduard Bernstein was greatly resented by his fellow socialists, in and out of the SPD, when he stated, quite correctly, that Marx had denied this “scientific” fact-value distinction.15 Values, to Marx as to Hegel, are incarnate in life and language, so that the positivists’ adherence to this fact-value distinction as a provisional necessary truth is impossible for a Marxist to uphold. As to the “facts”, one important reason why Marx attacked the classical economists, and the utopian socialists in the way he did is that they did not see through and beyond the immediate facts. Indeed, this was a way, according to Marx, of attacking the scientific pretensions of people like the classical economists and utopians. Proudhon is a case in point; according to Marx, he does not see through the assumptions of the economists. “The economist’s material,” wrote Marx, “is [properly] the active energetic life of man; M. Proudhon’s … is the dogmas of the economist.”16
Not only does Marx arrive at this point d’appui by means of a denial of the fact-value distinction so essential to the positivists; there is in Marx’s writings no distinction between evaluative and cognitive statements. Marx used evaluative language (which has been used to “prove” that Marx was in fact not the
“scientist” he “claimed” to be); like Hegel, he rejected Kantian dualism in favour of the unity of Sein and Sollen, a unity which is quite irreducible to that propounded by Comte. Nor is this all. Positivism, defined broadly as the importation of the concepts, methods, and models from the natural sciences into social and historical investigation, has, as its closest approximation to a model of historical change, a theory of social evolution modelled on biology (perhaps Darwin) or even geology (perhaps Lyall); it certainly drew encouragement after 1859, when The Origin of Species was first published, from Darwinism. Despite Comte’s belief that sociology could be the highest of the sciences, positivism has little enough to say about Marx’s very starting point – what it is that characterizes human society.
Kautsky’s attempted assimilation of evolutionistic and positivistic views with Marxism (his Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, published in 1906) is a synthesis of Marx and Darwin, which runs up against Marx’s own documented ambiguity about Darwin.17 This kind of attempt, made under the influence of an enthusiastic Engels, is inherently misleading in that Marx’s thought, by its very nature, emphasizes societies as systems of relations among human beings, of which the relations entered into for purposes of “production and reproduction” are primary. It is this that Marx considered would enable us to explain why societies change. Marx added to this a theory of consciousness; positivists, by contrast, often lack even a concept of action. In the “Preface” to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx, summarizing his method, also summarizes the relevant passages in The German Ideology. Again Marx proceeds from the “real life process” engaging men, the “production and reproduction of material existence”, of which intellectual and cultural activity is an “ideological reflex”.18
This is not an example of positivist methodology; and even though we might say that Marx accepted the idea that history had its own, internal logic, and could be conceived as a rational process, the implications, like the origins, of this view are Hegelian, not Comtean. Marx’s concept of Entwicklung, about which he said very little in any case, is based on that of Hegel; translated into English or French this term can mean “evolution” as well as “development”, although evolution in the biological sense, as a mode of social explanation, struck Hegel and Marx alike as chimerical. Entwicklung also embraces the development, or unfolding, of the components contained in the original concept (Begriff); in the sense that such development is logical, history is logical, a rational, secular unity. But unity, according to Hegel and Marx alike, is not the same as uniformity. Investigation into the actual historical process remains a matter for empirical research; and to stress the need for empirical research in this
sense is not a hallmark of scientific socialism. Nor is it merely a sine qua non of intellectually respectable Marxist historiography. It is a hallmark of scholarship, and a characteristic not so much of scientific socialism as of all understanding.
In particular, for Marx, the interaction of forces and relations of production is not invariant from epoch to epoch or from stage to stage; it is never said by Marx to yield a law by which the historical outcome could in principle be predicted in each successive case. There is, in other words, in Marx’s writings no general law formulated by abstraction from the principle of interaction itself. This is a vital difference from Comte, and for that matter from Engels. Even though the relationship of forces to relations of production is of paramount importance to Marx for the study of any known society, Marx did not proceed from this to maintain that the procedure of abstracting a general “law” – for purposes of prediction or anything else – was either possible or legitimate; and, unlike Comte, he did not claim that this procedure was a characteristic of scientific method. Marx did not try to deduce from any general law of social evolution or historical change any firm necessity for one type of society to be transformed progressively into a “more developed” one. To take one illustrative example, classical antiquity regressed according to Marx, and made room for a primitive type of feudalism instead of evolving to a “higher” level; the collapse of classical society was affected by the institution of slavery, which was both the productive basis of that society and the organic limit of its further development. In short, as George Lichtheim summarizes it, “it is by no means the case that the emergence of European feudalism from the wreckage of ancient society was treated by Marx as a matter of logical necessity”19 any more than he treats the advent of communist society as a fatalistic necessity rather than a necessary task. There is no sense in forming a social movement to help the sun rise, as Marx was well aware.
In seeing the proletariat as the embodiment and bearer of a new, higher form of society, Marx consistently spoke of the tasks confronting the movement, instead of a law of evolution in the Comtean or Spencerian manner. After Marx’s death, it is true, Kautsky and Plekhanov (who regarded philosophy as la science de la science)20 veered towards the latter approach, but this is the fault of Engels’s fateful and insensitive attempt at a synthesis of Comtean and Hegelian thought – a false synthesis which had the bizarre effect of bringing Marxism and positivism closer together than either Marx or Comte would have believed possible.
Marx did not treat history as the unfolding of anything metaphysical – no matter what Hegel or Comte had done – and did not claim to be in possession of a key called “the dialectic” (or, worse still, “dialectics”) which would open every
door. There is in Marx no dialectical mould into which facts have to be fitted; there is dialectical inquiry as a way of interpreting those things that happen. There are in Marx’s writings no universal, deterministic laws; positivists may have confused the consequent with the subsequent (and Engels, who believed in the possibility of making the post hoc identical with the propter hoc, certainly did so, too). But Marx made very few causal statements, and he specifically said that
events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historical surroundings lead to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by using as one’s masterkey a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
Engels defined “dialectics” as “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought” and insisted that “the dialectic in our heads is in reality the reflection of the actual development going on in the world of nature and of human history in obedience to dialectical forms”.21
Those who believe that political economy should borrow the methods of the natural sciences and that it should establish the laws of society just as the natural sciences establish those of physical nature will find little support in Marx’s writings. On the contrary, it is Marx’s writings themselves that they would have to contend with; and there is yet another reason why this is so. Marx’s analyses of society do not subordinate society to permanent laws like those of physics, because society is seen by Marx as being in transition, as moving towards a new arrangement in which the “laws” of classical economics will no longer apply. Marx even speaks of the spontaneous (naturwüchsige) growth of the division of labour, the State, legal conditions, etc., but always in the sense that revolutionary praxis will divest them of their characteristically uncontrolled development. Capital is designed to show us how and why these qualities and characteristics will cease to apply; the “iron laws” mentioned in Marx’s “Introduction” of 1867, far from being permanent features spanning successive modes of production, are in fact the hallmarks, “the attributes and the masks”, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, of one particular mode of production – capitalism – and are of no application outside it. “A Marxist political economy can speak of laws only within qualitatively distinct structures, which must be described in terms of history”, MerleauPonty, again accurately, points out; he goes on to say that “a priori, scientism seems a conservative idea, since it causes us to mistake the merely momentary
for the eternal”22 – a confusion that Marx’s work, we might add, is specifically designed to avoid.
Marx’s analyses in Capital constantly look through the highly abstract yet visible categories dealt with by the political economists, in order to disclose their “fetish character” and to demonstrate what lies not beyond but within them – the “hidden haunts of production, on whose threshold we are faced with the inscription: No admittance, except on business”.23 Such a procedure, such a Forschungsweise, would have seemed “metaphysical” to any positivist; yet, in contrast to the positivists’ denial of “essences” in any form, Marx constantly sought the “hidden substratum” (verborgener Hintergrund), the “inner connections” (innere Bäude), the “intrinsic movements” (innerliche Bewegungen), the “inner structure” (innerer Bau) connecting the phenomena under investigation. These terms, and terms like them, occur at crucial points in Marx’s writings. Marx’s search would be futile to any positivist; yet Marx, who believed that “scientific truth is always paradox if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things”, even went so far as to say that “all science would be superfluous if the manifest form [Erscheinungsform] and the essence of things directly coincided”,24 a statement no positivist would make. Positivists, whose nominalism generally entails the proposition that science cannot discover the difference between the given and the essences of any shape or form, also usually believe that science is a classification of facts which adds nothing to their contents, so that generalization per se has no independent cognitive function. To put the same point another way, positivists hold that the analytic procedures of concept-formation and theory-formation do not themselves change the domain of observed “reality”; so that abstractions add nothing to the empirically derived “facts”, facts that are directly observable in the same manner to different scientists. Reality to the positivist is, then, directly observable; an observable pattern of events can be seen without interpreting their “meaning”.
The standard objection to this positivist mode of procedure is worth mentioning, in so far as it points to a trap into which positivists fall, while Marx avoids it. The objection is that with a scientistic definition of knowledge, i.e. if we are to believe that all knowledge derives from the empirical-analytical method, how can we establish the validity of the metatheoretical postulate of scientism itself? To say that knowledge derives from scientific procedure, a metatheoretical claim, and then to try to prove this by pointing to the results of science is to involve oneself in a circle, because the very principle of scientific meaning is unjustified.
Marx’s self-proclaimed project was that of a critique of political economy, and his method was a critique of concepts, including a hard look at what these concepts refer to, a critique which spans the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts, and Poverty of Philosophy, the Grundrisse and Capital, a method that consists, inter alia, in a critical analysis of capitalism by means of a critique of those concepts that would be shown to be germane to capitalism. It is within this context that the word “scientific” is brought into play. Marx intended his work, the projected “critique of political economy” that he never completed, to be a contribution to the working-class movement, “a scientific victory for our party”.25
The word scientific was brought in, originally, not by Marx but by the English political economists whose work he was criticizing, since they were wont to refer to their subject as a science and to their own work as scientific, on the straightforward grounds that they were dealing with observed facts rather than imposed metaphysical categories. Political economy was commonly seen as “the science of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth”.26 However straightforward and unproblematic this may seem, Marx, for his part, was constantly engaged in disputing its very foundations – but he did not do so without appropriating “science” for his own use. In a letter to Engels in 1859, for example, we find Marx saying of his projected “Critique of Economic Categories” that
the presentation and style is completely scientific and therefore not policeprone in the usual sense … [this means that] the dogs cannot limit their criticism to mere bitching about [political] tendencies, and the whole looks exceedingly serious and scientific; I force the scoundrels to take my later views on capital rather seriously.27
Marx’s “Critique of Economic Categories” appeared in the form of Capital, and, earlier, the Grundrisse, where we find the same kind of critique of economic categories, still described as “scientific”, as the one we found in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology. For instance Marx is severely critical of John Stuart Mill’s view that “the laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths … they are ultimate laws, which we did not make, and to which we can only conform”. Mill’s denial of Vico’s verum factum did not endear him to Marx. Mill’s principles of production – “natural agents”, capital, the division of labour, and (worse still) labour itself – are presented as constituent “eternal natural laws independent of history” so that, according to Marx, Mill’s work “is the occasion for passing off, in an underhand way, bourgeois relations as irrevocable natural laws of society in the abstract”.28 The criticism is a familiar one to readers of Marx, who was
deeply suspicious of eternal laws and universal truths, scorning them as trivial, misleading, false, or – if you will – unscientific.
Marx insisted “the system of bourgeois economy, critically presented” is “the presentation of the system” and at the same time, through “this presentation, its critique”.29 The laws of the market present themselves with the force of natural necessity not because the market is in any real, ultimate sense a natural order, but because the blinkers have not been removed from men’s eyes, because the laws of capital accumulation operate, as it were, behind men’s backs, concealing the fact that the interaction of things to which they refer is in reality nothing but an expression of the social relationships of men to each other. “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science,” as Marx says in Capital, “is a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen.”30 In Marx’s successive critiques of political economy, “matter”, in so far as it appears at all, is presented in conformity with the “Theses on Feuerbach”, as a social rather than a simplistically-conceived natural category; all natural categories are, ipso facto, socially mediated. The natural sciences as such, which had been a prime source of materialist assertions ever since the French Enlightenment, provide for Marx no immediate understanding of material reality, because man’s relationships to reality are not according to Marx primarily theoretical but practical and modificatory. In one of his last works, and one of the last to be translated into English, Marx emphasized this point. Men are not “confronted” first with the “external” means to the satisfaction of their needs; they do not “stand” in any epistemological relation to them.
They begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., hence not by “standing” in a relation, but by relating themselves actively, taking hold of certain things in the external world through action, and thus satisfying their need[s]. (Therefore they begin with production.)
This passage parallels others that are rather better known.31 The emphasis throughout, in Capital as well as The German Ideology and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, is on labour, labour as an ontological category, on what specifically human agency does and what it brings about. Men, by their very nature, work on the constituent parts of the world – the world they find and the world they find made for them by other men – and thereby change the material world and the human social world at one and the same time.
This view is quite irreducible to a scientistic view of men confronted by an external world not of their own making, a world with its own immutable laws which merely human agency is powerless to deflect. Such a scientistic
viewpoint, which did influence Engels, and which Engels in turn influenced, has no place in Marx’s writings. Even to say that Marx, through an application of “science”, aimed at presenting an accurate reflection of the “facts” is to fail to take into account Marx’s own methodology, his own amply documented “mode of investigation” (Forschungsweise), which was “to appropriate the material in detail, analyze its different forms of development, and trace their inner link”.32 Whatever might be said of this procedure, it has nothing of “science” about it on most non-Marxian definitions. Marx’s approach, as contrasted with that of most of those – then or since then – who label their procedures “scientific”, is free from any metaphysical assumptions about the ontological primacy of any substance that might be termed “matter”. Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, with their critique of “all materialism up till now”, amount to Marx’s decisive separation of his own thought from the prevailing French Enlightenment view, a view perpetuated by Feuerbach himself, of natural science and the abstract “materialism” that went along with it. The only thing wrong with Alexander Bogdanov’s statement – that “although Marx called his doctrine ‘materialism’, its central concept is not matter but practice, activity, live labour”33 – is that Marx was not, for the most part, even inclined to call his doctrine “materialism” at all, probably to avoid confusion with the doctrine so trenchantly criticized in the “Theses on Feuerbach” and elsewhere.
The “Theses” should be seen, inter alia, as an attack on the Cartesian cogito, on the doctrine of the passive mind confronted by the “external” object. To the extent – a considerable extent – that its assertions about nature are isolated from the living practice of men, Engels’s philosophy of nature as set forth most dramatically in The Dialectics of Nature is subject to the criticisms Marx had levelled in the “Theses on Feuerbach”. Marx was too well-educated in philosophy to suppose that he could observe the capitalist world tout simplement, marshall data on the “facts”, and provide an explanation without simultaneously examining in a critical manner the concepts of political economy, concepts that, themselves, cannot be reduced to the “facts” in any direct or simplistic way, although they obviously refer to them and are to that extent correlative with them. Even so basic a concept (to capitalism) as “the commodity” is described in Capital as needing demystifying by its very nature.
A commodity is, therefore, a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of their labour, because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at once perceptible and imperceptible by
the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is, at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.34
Marx’s method was not one of the straightforward observations of a detached observer, of data-gathering and collation, and the subsequent construction of an explanatory and predictive system. Where, after all, are Marx’s predictions – as opposed to the guileless optimism expressed mainly in the privacy of his letters to Engels that “the revolution”, like prosperity, was just around the corner? Marx never claimed to be a scientist in this sense. Why should he have claimed this when his own amply-documented methodology denied its very foundation? Marx refused to argue from “matter” on the grounds he had laid down originally in The German Ideology: Feuerbach “refers particularly to the view of natural science, he mentions secrets revealed only to the eye of the physicist or chemist”;
but where would natural science be without industry or trade? … Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are given him only through social development, industry and commercial relations. The cherry tree, like all fruit trees, was transplanted into our zone [Western Europe], as is well known, by commerce; it was only by virtue of this action of a determinate society at a given time that it was given to the “sensuous certainty” of Feuerbach … even pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and activity, through the sensuous activity of men.35
It is important to get the sense of this. Any suggestion that all non-human things are products of human activity, in any simplistic way, is obviously false; but Marx is right in thinking that knowledge has its conditions and that these conditions are historical, that is, that they change. How one comes to know is not the same as the truth of what one believes; yet Marx’s belief is vindicated that “nature, taken abstractly, for itself, separated from man, is nothing for man”. Men, by their very nature, or more properly by their very humanity, apply themselves to the world. The interaction of human, sensuous activity and objectified nature is a process in which man’s labour produces the external world facing him. The world apprehended by the senses is in this sense the counterpart of the human being himself. “Nature, as it unfolds in human history, in the genesis of human society, is man’s real nature; hence nature, as it develops through industry, albeit in alienated form, is truly anthropological nature.”36 This viewpoint is not the complement but the reverse of Engels’s procedure of dedu-
cing historical laws from the operation of those of nature, conceived as an independent reality external to man.
As Alfred Schmidt has persuasively and perceptively argued, Marx
does not attempt to assert anything of the material world in abstraction from the practico-intellectual forms of its “appropriation” by a given society … it appears to be impossible to derive the idea of a revolutionary humanism from the self-movement of “matter” conceived through the eyes of particular natural sciences.37
Engels and Feuerbach, on the one hand, as well as Marx, on the other, can be taken to demonstrate the force of Schmidt’s statement; and, in the case of Marx, this means merely that he remained true to the critique of what he called “all materialism up till now” first stated programmatically in the “Theses on Feuerbach”. The external world is accessible to man only in its humanized form – which means, for one thing, that men’s consciousness of that world, and their activity within it, cannot be reduced to their behaviour faced with it. (That consciousness and action can be reduced to behaviour is, however, an idea that characterizes certain forms of scientism.)
Marx preserved intact his position that nature is “the primary source of all the instruments and objects of labour” by insisting, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, that nature cannot be so much as apprehended in abstraction from the human activity of producing and constantly reproducing it, of adapting its successive forms for successive human purposes. This may not be a position from which any firm belief in the cognitive value of science as such could be built; but nevertheless, it is a position from which Marx himself never wavered. Man, as the connecting link between the instrument and the object of labour, changes his own nature (and realizes its potentialities) as he deprives external nature of its externality, and mediates nature through himself – the same process that capitalism as a form of alienated social life parodies and perverts when it posits the concepts of use-value (rather than usefulness as such) and exchange-value.38
The “Introduction” to the first volume of Capital suggests that Marx believed that the discovery of the “laws of motion” governing the development of capitalism was not in principle impossible. This “Introduction” has seemed to some to be the locus classicus of scientistic Marxism, for this reason: it seemed to demonstrate that the “mature” Marx was not so very different from the Engels of The Dialectics of Nature after all. These charges, deeply mistaken though they are, deserve consideration. Marx’s meaning, upon closer examination of the relevant passages in this “Introduction”, is in fact of far more limited application.
Marx in this 1867 “Introduction” is, as we might expect from something addressed to a German readership not too familiar with the ideas of Marx, a
response to the very different ideas of Lassalle. In order to demonstrate to a readership that might otherwise be disinclined to accept an analysis of English capitalism as an analysis of capitalism per se, that “one nation can and should learn from others”, Marx is concerned to maintain, above all, that the “classic ground” of the capitalist mode of production is indeed England “and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode” exist there as nowhere else. “The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future.” Why should this be so? Marx says,
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.
Here Marx, far from predicting the inevitability of the advent of Communist society, is actually doing almost the opposite. He is combating complacency. (That the SPD never listened is another story.) According to what are presented to us as the “natural laws” of capitalist production, capitalist society itself is likely to develop internally from a lower to a higher form. This development, Marx goes on to say, is no more than “likely”. For even when a society has got on the right track for the discovery of the “natural laws” of its own movement (a discovery that cannot of itself be automatic, or Marx would not have written this in the first place; there would have been no need to do so), “it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactment, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its own development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs”. Thus, even though Marx says that “it is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society”, and even though he describes “this standpoint” as one from which “the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history”, his purpose was in fact far less scientistic than many commentators (first and foremost Engels) have supposed. Marx in this “Introduction” was attempting to indicate to his German readers that
in England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must re-act on the continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself.
Marx’s focus throughout is not so much on the status of science as on the tasks facing the German workers’ movement.
Far from sharing Engels’s well-known belief in the possibility and desirability of a “science of the most general laws of motion” in society (and in nature), Marx is stopping well short, contenting himself in the 1867 “Introduction” with sounding as “scientific” as possible while remaining as flexible in his prescriptions for the German working-class movement as circumstances (and the residual effects of Lassalleanism) would allow. The “inevitable” working-out of “iron laws” (a Lassallean phrase if ever there was one) is in fact portrayed by Marx as being subject to contingency, as Marx in this “Introduction” was only too well aware; it is, in any case, at best a feature of capitalism – within which mode of production there are distinct national variations that threaten fatally to mislead the German workers’ movement. Within capitalism, in any case, as we know from all of Marx’ writings (and as we have been given a salutary recent reminder by Lucio Colletti),39 an altogether peculiar mode of objectivity pertains. The “inevitable” working-out of “iron laws” is not, in Marx’s eyes, an invariant attribute of the human condition. It refers to the internal development of capitalism from a lower to a higher stage; and, what is more, there is here, as elsewhere in Marx’s writings, as we might expect, an implicit suggestion, not very far below the surface, that once understood and once acted on in a conscious manner, these same “iron laws” will give way to conscious social control of the productive process.
Marx was, of course, prepared and willing to compare his work and methods to those of the natural scientist, for the sake of the favourable connotations of the word science, connotations that were particularly favourable to late nineteenth-century German intellectuals. Yet at the same time it should be acknowledged that Marx was concerned to limit – and to limit with extreme care – the analogies that could be drawn between his work and that of natural scientist. The main body of the first volume of Capital is full of such contrasts;40 but even in the “Introduction” itself this stands out. “[In] the analysis of economic forms,” Marx says, “neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both” – a statement of methodology no positivist could make or accept. While he did not hesitate to use the empirical discoveries of natural science against spiritualist metaphysics, including the Hegelian variety, his underlying purpose in so doing should not be overlooked. The word “scientific” was used by Marx in contradistinction to the “absolute” truths of “Justice” or “Reason” of the utopians; it was used, as the opposite of the word “arbitrary” or “fantastic”, in order to distinguish facts and empirical investigation from pious wishes, including those of the “socialist miracle workers” he was so concerned to denigrate.
The German usage of the word Wissenschaft is of still wider application, and was so in Marx’s day too. The common German distinction between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft cannot easily be rendered into English; and the adjective that Marx used, wissenschaftlich, is commonly and accurately rendered as “factual”, “logical”, “non-random”, “rigorous”, “systematic” as well as
“scientific” in the narrower, English sense. (Even in French, “la science” can well mean “knowledge”, though not to M. Althusser and his followers.) Marx, who constantly attacked other writers, socialist and non-socialist, for their “scientific” pretensions, entertained surprisingly few himself. He can, of course, be accused of vagueness; but the cognitive content and status of the word scientific was not what he took to be the central problem facing him, and facing us. Yet in many ways Marx’s usage is less vague than such a statement might suggest. Even in the 1867 “Introduction” to Capital the line between appropriating for his own use the positive connotations of the word science, and accepting its denotations (which in many cases known to Marx were overwhelmingly negative) is drawn with some precision. The idea that science, broadly conceived, increases our power to act, that objective knowledge about what men do will increase their freedom and power, does not really tell us very much; after all, Freud believed it just as much as Marx, and Freud and Marx (pace Marcuse et al.) have very little else in common. The most that might be allowed in the case of Marx is that his systematic observation of society is not the same thing as “scientific” observation; and that Marx did think that his observations were scientific, for reasons which had nothing to do with any belief in the cognitive value or status of natural science as such.
How, then, did Marx use the term “science”? What did he mean when he described his work as being “scientific”? At widely separated points in his career, Marx lambasted Proudhon’s “scientific” pretensions (“the twaddle about ‘science’ and sham display of it, which are always so unedifying”); the Poverty of Philosophy, its author was to recall, shows “how Proudhon and the utopians are hunting for a so-called ‘science’ by which a formula for the ‘solution of the social problem’ is to be excogitated a priori, instead of deriving their science from a critical knowledge of the social movement”. Proudhon “wants to soar as a man of science above the bourgeois and the proletarians”; he is, however, “in agreement with both in wanting to fall back on the authority of science [which] for him reduced itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula”.41 These accusations are important; Marx himself has been accused of wanting to fall back on the authority of science, because, it is said, he was a “materialist” who broke with Hegelian idealism.
This charge deserves meeting. Marx stressed the need for “empirical observation [which] must … bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structures with production”; he believed that even his early “conclusions [were] the fruit of an entirely empirical analysis based on a careful study of political economy”;42 while Proudhon, and others like him, set out to apply “ideal” standards (one of which, in Proudhon’s case, was “science” itself) to the study of society and history, Marx set out to base his analyses on what men actually do in society. This dis-
tinction raises an important methodological point. Work, for Marx, is not, for all its centrality, a “metabolic” process involving man, nature and society if this means that it involves a metaphysical conception of praxis which may be invoked as an absolute point of departure or as a pre-categorical postulate. The world is not a scientific laboratory writ large. Marx’s emphasis on constitutive labour, indeed, depends upon his belief that there are no such extrinsic principles, preceding empirical enquiry that can be “applied” to the “facts”. To see dialectic as a universal passepartout, or as a formula into which the “facts” may be squeezed, is to misconstrue the nature of dialectical methodology. Observation does not proceed from someone on the sidelines of society, for society has no sidelines. It also has no universals, so Marx makes use of any universal category in only the most restricted of senses.
There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general characteristics of production are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.43
This means, inter alia, that the idea that scientific method, any scientific method, embodies constitutive force is a utopian delusion.
Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and the communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class,… these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and become its mouthpiece…. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire, and has become revolutionary.44
Marx’s distinction between doctrinaire, utopian science and revolutionary science is more relevant here than either that between “utopian” and “scientific”
socialism (to which Marx’s distinction does not correspond) or, indeed, that between Hegelian “idealism” and Marx’s “materialism”. This latter, overdrawn schematization, which has bedevilled even recent Marx scholarship, is in no way implied by Marx’s own “materialist interpretation of history” which is wholly compatible, methodologically, with his attacks on “all materialism up till now” (in the “Theses on Feuerbach”) and on “the abstract materialism of natural science” (in Capital).45 The materialism Marx attacks in either case is that of the French Enlightenment, as mediated (with some Young-Hegelian emendations) by Feuerbach. Eighteenth-century materialism is not, of course, all of a piece, although many aspects of it favour a doctrinaire approach to, and evaluation of, natural science, an approach which is attacked by Marx (though, notably, not by Engels) for reasons that tell us a great deal about Marx’s conception of non-doctrinaire science. The mechanistic Cartesian view of nature, which rejects any distinction between res extensa and res cogitans, entails the primacy of matter, a causa finalis; all motion, including that of the mind, is said to derive from that which inheres in matter. The soul, for which, mutatis mutandis, we may read “consciousness”, is a modus of the body; because our ideas are no more than mechanical motions, there is on this reductive – indeed, reductionist – view nothing distinctive about human ideas and actions; and Marx, for this very reason, was hostile to Descartes’s bete machine, to L’homme machine of la Mettrie, and to d’Holbach’s portrayal of man as matière sensible. Antimetaphysical materialism, which informs nineteenth-century positivism, can be dismissed as a contradictio in adjecto if “matter” itself is seen as a metaphysical category (although this point seems not to have occurred to Engels, whose Dialectics of Nature reduces everything either to energy or to matter)46 but this argument cannot apply to those materialists who attempted to overcome an acknowledged dualism of man and nature by using a Lockean tabula rasa epistemology, and who were closer to Marx – if not to Engels – than Cabanis and the other Cartesians. Their efforts led not to positivism, but, by indirection, to socialism; even so, the belief that human development may be predicated upon educational manipulation of the sources of perception, which may be found in Babeuf, Fourier, Cabet and Owen as well as Condorcet, is also condemned by Marx. It cannot account for historical change because it, too, reduces men to the state of being acted upon from without, and reduces the historicity of human nature to the way in which men are confronted with res gestae. Even this
Lockean materialism regards men – who register perceptions and act according to the impulses received – as supine, passive and receptive; but unlike Cartesian materialism, which has no bearing on man and society sui generis, it is sufficiently social in its bearing to be able to develop, at times, a real theory of the historicity of knowledge. To Condillac, for instance, since knowledge is impossible without language, it must be the product of social life in the sense that language is; and this argument is closer, in fact, to the attack in The German Ideology on German idealism47 than it is to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Marx also made use of some arguments developed by German idealism against the excesses of “all materialism up till now”; “the active side [of social existence] was developed” (however “abstractly”) “in opposition to materialism”.48 While Hegel, unlike Feuerbach, had stressed the world-constitutive side of our coming to-know, Marx, who was closer in this respect to Condillac, stressed that the constitutive function of thought and action on the world arises not from thought but from men’s life in the world. The extreme radicalism of what follows – “after the disappearance of the other-worldliness of truth [das Jenseits der Wahrheit] the task of history is to establish the truth of thisworldliness [das Wahrheit des Diesseits]”49 – is hostile to Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and to Lenin’s warmed-over copy theory of perception in Materialism and Empirio-criticism alike. Because nature itself is not independent in the required sense, scientific truth is no mere correspondence of human perceptions and judgments to an independent reality; there can be no real apprehension of the world without its alteration, no perception without action on the object perceived. Marx substitutes the directionality of history for Hegel’s reflexivity of consciousness in society; not only is our practice, as with Vico, our guarantee of knowing the reality we have made, but we are both actors and authors in our own drama in the additional sense that we may have no real knowledge of the world without practical activity (praktische Tätigkeit) within it. Work creates human reality, extricates it from a given situation, and goes beyond given conditions, continually remaking what had been made.
What Marx abhorred about idealism was not its constitutive side (which he extended to cover labour, against naïve materialism) but its abstract, speculative side. Yet, of course, “the abstract materialism of natural science” may be just as speculative as idealism, and Marx is perfectly aware of this. “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”;50 and this is just as true of scientific thinking as of any
other kind. Marx, indeed, regarded scientific thinking as either scholastic or practical in so early a work as his doctoral dissertation, “Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie”. Marx in 1841 favoured Epicurus over Democritus because, unlike Democritus, who was concerned with the atom as a pure, “abstract” category, and with atomism as a hypothesis explaining physical nature tout court, Epicurus sought to understand nature in order to rid men of spiritual bondage and teach them a better way of life; Epicurus, “the greatest Greek Aufklärer”,51 founded science as something that would include, not exclude as with Democritus, man’s consciousness and action in the world. Engels, who also explained man and nature in consonant terms, is nevertheless closer to Democritus (and, mutatis mutandis, to Descartes), not so much because of the atomic view of matter he shares with Democritus but because he applied the terms he had derived from a hypostatized natural science across the board to society, and because to this extent he regarded natural science as prior to history.
For Marx, by contrast, the truths of natural science, far from providing any model for truths about society, are themselves dependent on the social purposes which provide the climate and the context of the scientist’s enterprise; “genuine science” has to proceed from “sensuous need”,52 not vice versa. The crucial distinction in Marx’s thought, a distinction very much to the fore whenever he discussed science, is not the supposed polarity of idealism and materialism: a stress on activity and a materialist epistemology are not the same thing. Marx, to whom theory itself becomes a material force once it moves the masses,53 in fact attempted an ambitious replacement of epistemology by ontology.54 The crucial distinction in his thought is that between speculation, contemplation and “abstract” reflection, on the one hand, and reality, history, society, concreteness and the empirical enquiry that is appropriate to it, on the other. Engels oversimplifies, indeed parodies, this distinction by making of it a contrast between utopian and scientific thinking; yet abstract speculation, as Marx was well aware when he wrote about the French materialists and about Democritus, specifically, even prominently, includes much doctrinaire scientific reasoning. In Marx’s own words, “one basis for life and another for science is a priori false”;55 science, in isolation from society, is as speculative as idealism at its worst.
1 Friedrich Engels, ‘Preface’ to the second edition of Anti-Dühring, 1885; Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, tr. Ben Brewster, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 207, n. 121; Karl Marx, Capital, Moscow, 1961, vol. I, p. 309 (cf. Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867, in Engels on Capital, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1941, pp. 123–4; A.V. Miller, tr., Hegel’s Science of Logic, London, Allen & Unwin 1969, pp. 177–8. The passage about the transformation of quantity into quality occurs in Das Kapital, 1867, 1872 and 1883 editions, and in Le Capital, 1872–75.
2 Leszek Kolakowski, “Permanent and Transitory Aspects of Marxism”, in The Broken Mirror: A Collection of Writings from Contemporary Poland, ed. Pavel Mayevski, New York, 1958, p.166.
3 See Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man, Boston, Beacon Press, 1967, pp. 227–37, and Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Works of Max Weber”, Negations, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969, pp. 201–36. Jürgen Habermas, “Science and Technology as ‘Ideology’”, in Toward a Rational Society, tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Boston, Beacon Press, 1970, pp.81–122.
4 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, tr. Austryn Wainhouse, New York, Random House, 1972, p. 39.
5 George Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study, New York, Praeger, 1971, pp.236, 243n.
6 Maximilien Rubel, “Marx et la première Internationale: une chronologie”, Etudes de Marxologie, Paris, August 1965.
7 Zbigniew A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1967, pp. 374–5.
8 Jacques Freymond, La première Internationale, recueil de documents, Geneva, Droz (Publications de l’Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, No. 39), 1962, vol. II, pp.233–4; cf. Rubel, “Marx et la premiere Internationale”.
9 T.B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx, Early Writings, New York and London, McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 1963–4. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1964, pp. 38–9.
10 Marx to J.B. Schweitzer, 24 January 1865, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (hereafter cited as MESW), Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, vol. I, pp.390–7.
11 David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, London: Macmillan, 1974, pp. 380–1.
12 Royden Harrison, “E.S. Beesly and Karl Marx”, International Review of Social History, Amsterdam, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geshiedenis, vol. 4, 1959, pp. 22–58, 208–38; Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, tr. T.E. Hulme and J. Roth, Glencoe, Free Press, 1950, p. 101.
13 Marx to Engels, 7 July 1866, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (hereafter cited as MEGA), vol. III, p. 345. Karl Marx, ‘Afterword’ to the 2nd edition of Das Kapital, vol. I (dated 1873), Capital, p.17; see also ibid, p. 232, n. 3 (the only time Comte’s name appears in the text).
14 Harrison, “E.S. Beesly and Karl Marx”, p. 235.
15 On Bernstein, see Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, New York, Collier, 1968, passim; and George Lichtheim, Marxism, esp. pp. 264 ff., and 284 ff.
16 Karl Marx, ThePoverty of Philosophy, Moscow, International Publishers, n.d., p. 101.
17 For a discussion, see Valentina Gerratana, “Marx and Darwin”, New Left Review, vol. 82, November–December 1973, pp. 60–89; and Shlomo Avineri, “From Hoax to Dogma: a Footnote on Marx and Darwin”, Encounter, March 1967, pp. 30–2.
18 MESW, vol. 1, pp. 361–5; Marx to Engels, 7 August 1866, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke(hereafter cited as MEW), vol. xxxi, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1965, p. 348.
19 George Lichtheim, “On the Interpretation of Marx’s Thought”, in Marx and the Western World, ed. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1967; reprinted in George Lichtheim, From Marx to Hegel, New York, Seabury, 1974, pp. 63–80.
20 Plekhanov to Kautsky, December 1898, quoted in J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1968, vol. I, p. 202.
21 Marx to the editorial board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (hereafter cited as MESC), Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965, p. 313. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, p. 504; Engels to Schmidt, 1 November 1891, in MESC, p. 590.
22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, tr. H.L. and P.A. Dreyfus, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 125–6.
23 Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 176.
24 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, p. 797.
25 Marx to Weydemeyer, 1 February 1859, MEW, vol. xxix, p. 572.
26 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1885 edition, vol. XIX, pp. 346–7.
27 Marx to Engels, 13–15 January 1859, quoted in Terell Carver, ed., Karl Marx: Texts on Method, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1975, p. 10.
28 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, London, Longman’s, Green, 1848, vol. I, pp.239–40; Carver, Texts on Method, p. 107.
29 Carver, Texts on Method, p. 157; Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1885, MEW, vol. xxix, p. 550.
30 Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 372, n. 3.
31 Carver, Texts on Method, p. 190; Marx, Capital, vol. I, pp. 177–8; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 31–2.
32 Marx, ‘Afterword’ to Capital, vol. I, p. 19.
33 Alexander Bogdanov, quoted by S.V. Utechin, “Philosophy and Society”, in Leo Labedz, ed., Revisionism, London and New York, Praeger, 1962 [1953], p. 118.
34 Carver, Texts on Method, p. 9; Capital, vol. I, p. 72.
35 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 58.
36 Bottomore, Karl Marx, Early Writings, p. 164.
37 Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, pp. 10–11.
38 Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in MESW, vol. II, p. 18; Capital, vol. I, 43; Capital, vol. II, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, p. 144.
39 Lucio Colletti, “Marxism: Science or Revolution”, in Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology in Social Science, London, Fontana, 1972, pp. 369–77.
40 Marx, Capital, vol. I, pp. 72, 183, 215.
41 Marx to J.B. Schweitzer, 24 January 1865; appendix to Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, pp.186–94. Passages cited are on pp. 190–1.
42 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 38–9; Marx, Early Writings, p. 63; MEGA, vol. I/3, p. 33.
43 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, tr. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 88; cf. ibid., p. 85, and Galvano della Volpe, “Methodologische Fragen in Karl Marx’ Schriften von 1843 bis 1859”, Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, (East) Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1958, vol. 6, pp. 777–804, esp. pp. 792–804, which deal with the Grundrisse.
44 Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, p. 120. Marx refers to this passage in his “Marginal Notes” on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (which he read as an aid to learning Russian). “Utopian socialism … wants to attach people to new delusions instead of confining its science to the knowledge of the social movement made by the people itself” (MEW, vol. xviii, p. 636; Karl Marx, The First International and After, ed. and tr. David Fernbach, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 337).
45 Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 372, n. 2.
46 “By matter [Engels] meant the Daltonian billiard ball atoms envisaged by contemporary Victorian science” and, mutatis mutandis, by Democritus. See Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, London, Allen Lane, 1974, passim.; and an anonymous review of it in The Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 1974, p. 175. That “the materialist conception of nature is still not the materialist conception of history” was, however, acknowledged by Plekhanov. Cf. George Plekhanov, “For the 60th Anniversary of Hegel’s Death”, Selected Philosophical Works, tr. R. Dixon, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d., vol. I, p. 472; cf. ‘The Development of the Monist View of History’, Selected Philosophical Works, p.606.
47 See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 37, 41–2, 491.
48 Marx, “First Thesis on Feuerbach”: “Practical activity is apprehended [by Feuerbach] only in its dirty-Jewish manifestation”, i.e. Feuerbach arrived at practical activity only after he had considered the “proper” human attitude – which was in his view (according to Marx) “Theoretical” and “Christian”.
49 MEGA, vol. I/1/I, p. 608; Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. and tr. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1972, p. 132.
50 Marx, ‘Second Thesis on Feuerbach’.
51 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 147. For Marx’s doctoral dissertation, see MEGA, vol. I/1/I, pp. 1 ff; Norman Livergood, Activity in Marx’s Philosophy, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, passim. Cf. David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, New York, Harper & Row, 1970, p. 53n.
52 Bottomore, Karl Marx, Early Writings, pp. 163–4. Marx in the Manuscripts regarded “the great achievement of Feuerbach” over Hegel to have been that the “founded genuine materialism and positive science by making the social relationship of ‘man to man’ the basic principle of his theory”, ibid., p. 197; in The German Ideology (1845–46) he criticized Feuerbach for not pushing his “achievement” towards a “practical” materialism, but never changed his mind about science.
53 Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p. 137.
54 I am indebted to Reinhard Bendix for putting the problem to me in these terms.
55 Bottomore, Karl Marx, Early Writings, p. 164.